Political manipulation combined with serious lapses on the part of the administration has raised doubts about the genuineness of the census in Sindh. Enumeration of houses, the first step towards the population census, began on April 5 and will be completed by April 19. In case the census becomes controversial, it will give birth to a wave of unrest in Sindh which has the potential of becoming the most explosive and destabilising issue. This is understandable on account of the economic and political implications of the exercise. The census determines the share of the people in an area in development funds and social amenities. The factor of population has an 82 percent weightage in the distribution of the NFC award. A major purpose of the census is to enable the government to prioritise socio-economic developments in a given area. The allocation of seats to a province or an area in a province is also made on the basis of the number of people living there.
The census has to be honest and transparent. The exercise will otherwise lose credibility among international organisations like the UN, its related bodies, the IFIs and donor countries.
The ethnic balance in Sindh is fragile on top of being a highly contentious issue. There was therefore a need to devise a well thought out plan to ensure that the balance was not artificially changed by any interest group. The Sindhi population being overwhelmingly rural is known to be less inclined to family planning compared to those concentrated in the urban areas. What is more, the Sindhis are much less used to migration to other provinces or foreign countries. Thus, unless things are engineered what one would expect from the census is an increase rather than decrease in the Sindhi population.
Like all bureaucratic exercises, the plan of Census 2011 looks perfect on paper. In practice, it has hit serious snags with complaints of irregularities coming from every nook and corner of the province. The complaints indicate that a concerted attempt is afoot to manufacture a census that would reduce the Sindhi majority in their own province.
The issue was initially raised by the Sindhi media which published reports that showed attempts were being made by an ethnic outfit to under-enumerate the Sindhi households. The laws in the census exercise that helped the manipulators were underlined. This was followed by columns and editorial comments to draw the attention of the government to what was going on under its command. Meanwhile, Sindhi nationalist and progressive partiers particularly Rasul Bux Palejos Awami Tehrik and Qadir Magsis Sindh Taraqqi Pasand Party initiated protest marches to highlight the issue.
The crux of the matter is that those in power in Sindh failed to realise that attempts to alter the ethnic balance artificially were going to be made. They also underestimated the volatility of the issue. The PPP leadership failed to put in place credible measures that could have stopped the manipulation of the exercise.
No special measures were devised to ensure an honest census in the urban centers. There are complaints now of an ethnic outfit having taken over the enumeration of houses in parts of the cities. There are reports from several areas of Karachi of the census teams being accompanied by the activists designated by MQM who instruct the team members to act as dictated by them. In the no go areas, the teams are told to stay at the party offices while activists themselves go around numbering every empty plot and under construction premises complete with the fake names of their supposed occupants. There are also reports of the undercounting of Sindhi households in several other urban centers of the province.
A policy regarding the internally displaced persons living in the province along with migrant labour should have been devised to ensure that they did not tilt the ethnic balance. National Database Registration Authority should have canceled the identity cards reportedly issued to over 1.3 million aliens.
The census staff was not properly trained keeping in view the cultural and geographical peculiarities of the province. There are reports of the census staff enumerating multistoried houses and buildings inhabited by several families as single housing units. This, despite the fact, that under the vehra system in Sindh, several families may live in a house with a single exit.
Fears are also being expressed regarding the minorities being under counted. This can happen especially in Thar where a large section of the local population migrates to other districts in search of jobs during the ongoing season. So far, there seems to be no well-defined policy about the enumeration of their houses.
Days after the enumeration started, there were reports of census teams failing to reach a number of areas in Kohistan, Thar and the riverine areas with difficult access. It is not known how the houses are to be listed and heads counted in case of the people displaced by the floods who are living in makeshift huts scattered all around upper Sindh.
Had the Sindh PPP leadership given timely attention to the issue, there would have been fewer complaints of injustice being done to the Sindhi population.
The writer is a former academic and a political analyst.